REVIEW 764: PANGA

Release date:	January 24, 2020
Director:	Ashwiny Iyer Tiwary
Cast:	Kangana Ranaut, Yagya Bhasin, Jassie Gill, Neena Gupta, Megha Burman, Smita Dwivedi, Rajesh Tailang, Richa Chadha
Language:	Hindi

She was the captain of the Indian kabaddi team with an international career awaiting her before the birth of a premature baby prompted her to turn her back on the game she loves. Jaya Nigam did not have in-laws  pressuring her or a husband bullying her: she simply did what she did because it did not occur to her that there was an option and, as her son later points out, it did not occur to her husband to share her load.

Seven years later, which is when we first meet her, Jaya is running a ticket counter for the Indian Railways in Bhopal, micromanaging her child’s life and constantly stressed out. She adores her family and they adore her right back, but a dissatisfaction gnaws at her that she finally confronts during a minor quarrel at home. So begins her journey to return to the country’s kabaddi scene.

Kangana Ranaut plays Jaya, a woman like a million others whose professional dreams remain unfulfilled because she did not treat them as a priority. The film does not judge her nor does it particularly advocate the choice she makes: it is what it is and we are simply being told that this is what she did. This non-judgemental but non-idolising view of Jaya is the selling point of Panga.

In Ashwiny Iyer Tiwary’s directorial debut, the sleeper hit Nil Battey Sannata, a poor mother goes back to school to spark ambition in her daughter who, till then, had a “well, a housemaid’s daughter will obviously grow up to be a housemaid” approach to life. Chanda in that lovely film had to cross several external hurdles and handle her troubled relationship with her child. In Panga, Iyer Tiwary has Jaya battling almost entirely with herself. We are surrounded by women like her: women who are so entrenched in home management that they are convinced their families are incapable of handling the job and their families therefore never give it a shot. Again, Panga neither judges Jaya’s attitude nor idolises it – it is what it is and she is who she is.

The first half of Panga is thoroughly engaging as it portrays Jaya’s blissful domestic existence and quietly simmering discontent in a charming, understated fashion. It is only in the second half that it gradually becomes evident that, heartwarming though the film’s positivity is, it also ends up giving us a sanitised view of middle-class India and women’s struggles.

Apart from her own choices, there is almost nil conflict in Jaya’s life. Her husband is loving and angelic to the point of being near perfect. Her mother is near perfect. Her son may say a couple of hurtful things to his parents but he too is a darling. Her neighbour is ever willing to chip in. Her friend, a professional coach played by Richa Chadha, drops everything at the drop of a hat to move to another city for her. Her colleagues are fond of her. If her boss is hard on her, it is because she is late to work. And she encounters no gender prejudice from men in the personal or professional sphere. None. In fact, so intent is the film on reminding us that family did not stand in Jaya’s way, that having made the point convincingly through the narrative in the first half, it gets her to say so in so many words to a TV journalist in the second half, as if in a bid to ensure that conservative audiences got the point.

In fact, the ONLY opposition she faces while working towards her career goals comes from women: her mother’s mild admonition is overshadowed by the mean female team captain, and a fleeting glimpse of mothers at her son’s school indicates that they are a nasty lot. Men – her coach when she was younger, her husband, the coaches she encounters during her second innings, the son whose goading is responsible for getting her back in sports – are all unequivocally supportive. The thing is, individually each of these characters is believable. Collectively viewed though, the overall niceness scrubs out the reality of women’s struggles in middle-class India steeped as it is in misogyny, sexism and discrimination. And the unstated point that women are the only ones who stand in the way of other women is offensive (though saleable to the masses of course) because it is far removed from the truth – no doubt plenty of women play along with patriarchy, but men helm and benefit from it, so why are we pretending otherwise?

The film’s play-it-safe nature is seen in other ways. Like in Sultan before it, when an ambitious woman gets pregnant, the A-word is not even mentioned. I am not suggesting that all ambitious women would consider abortion in such circumstances, but that it is unrealistic to portray a scenario in which not a single person brings up the possibility.

Elsewhere, although Panga makes an appearance of being cool around Chadha’s character, the normalisation of Jaya’s casual dismissiveness towards her at one point because she is unmarried is problematic and the ending suggests that the team of this film – like Chhapaak before it – just cannot fathom being single as a possible ‘happy ending’ for a woman. In this matter it reveals the innate conservatism closeted even in most liberals.

To be honest, it hurts to make these points about Panga, because Iyer Tiwari gives her film a pleasant tone at all times, the rhythm of the narrative never lets up, the ending is gripping and it is a film I liked at many levels. The charismatic Ranaut’s sedate performance anchors the narrative and she never wavers even when her character’s stress reaches fever pitch. Jassie Gill is wonderful in the role of her husband, making him an Everyman in whom every woman might find an ally. The supporting cast is dotted with likeable actors. And the very confident Yagya Bhasin as the lead couple’s son never allows his character’s maturity to cross a line into precocious acting.

Panga is charming and in the first half very credible, but its charm also camouflages the warts in the world women face every day.

Rating (out of 5 stars): 2.75

CBFC Rating (India):	U
Running time:	129 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/panga-movie-review-kanganas-sedate-turn-anchors-a-heartening-but-sanitised-take-on-middle-class-india-7950101.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panga_(film)

REVIEW 640: ISHQERIA

Release date:	September 21, 2018
Director:	Prerna Wadhawan
Cast: Language:	Richa Chadha, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Raj Babbar Hindi

Life is too short to be spent elaborately analysing non films like this one, so let me cut to the chase. Ishqeria – a title through which ‘writer’-‘director’ Prerna Wadhawan wishes to convey the love sickness of her lead pair – is ordinary, flat and possesses not a single imaginative bone in its entire body. At first I was tempted not to rate it at all but on second thoughts, here you go Richa Chadha and Neil Nitin Mukesh, this 0.5 star is entirely and completely awarded to you for keeping a straight face instead of laughing your heads off on camera throughout this misadventure.

Ishqeria is about Kuhu (Chadha) and Raghav (Mukesh) who meet while studying in Mussoorie. Their college is done up in all the colours of the rainbow, bubblegum and candyfloss, and that is how the girls dress too. She is dowdy and chirpy, he is quiet and elegant. She is a much-mocked fresher, he is the most sought after senior around. She is middle class, he is the son of the wealthiest man in Mussoorie.

Using a strategy devised by her girlie gang, which includes evolving into a stylish hottie, Kuhu manages to draw Raghav’s attention and they fall in love. Each of the characters in this setting has been borrowed from college romances made across film industries a zillion times before. To stir the pot up a bit, a Holi song – once a Bollywood staple – is added to the recipe and one of Kuhu’s friends is made to repeatedly say “tatti” (shit) as some sort of cool signature word. I promise you I am not joking.

We are told right at the start that Raghav is a suffering soul, harbouring a grand grudge against his father. There is a kahaani mein twist involving abortion that connects his past to his present with  Kuhu. Never mind what it is. Abortion is a serious issue, but Ishqeria does not have the intellect to handle it with any degree of depth. Frankly it does not have the anything to handle anything apart from a budget large enough that Wadhawan could afford to cast Chadha, Mukesh and Raj Babbar (as Raghav’s father) plus ensure that the production certainly does not look inexpensive.

Ishqeria switches between the present and seven years earlier when Kuhu and Raghav were in college. Poor Chadha suffers as a consequence, saddled as she is with big curls, a fringe and pigtails by turns in an in-your-face effort to make her look like a teenager. Perhaps she should be grateful that she was not asked to say “tatti” as a refrain to lend coolth to her character.

Barring a couple of initial scenes that Chadha invests with humour when Kuhu is just settling into college life, Ishqeria has nothing to offer. Wadhawan is so clueless that she packs her screenplay with artificial conflicts and an unconvincing resolution. She and her dialogue writer Radhika Anand struggle so hard to sound clever that I started giggling at one point during a conversation which starts with Raghav asking his friend Amit where he might find Kuhu, to which Amit inexplicably replies, “Kuhu koi jadibooti nahin hai jo koi dukaan mein milegi” (Kuhu is not a herb that you might expect to find in a shop). I gathered from the exchange that followed, that this might have been his way of asking, “Why would you ask me?” or “Why the hell should I tell you?” Or maybe it was a profoundly philosophical observation and I missed the meaning. Whatever.

Since the choice of title indicates that Ms Wadhawan is interested in disease names, perhaps she could come up with a term for the affliction that causes some people to think that any Tom, Dick or Prerna with the necessary funds has the ability to make a good film.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	118 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/ishqeria-movie-review-richa-chadha-neil-nitin-mukesh-deserve-an-award-for-remaining-earnest-through-this-silly-film-5250451.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishqeria

REVIEW 593: DAAS DEV

Release date:	April 27, 2018
Director:	Sudhir Mishra
Cast: Language:	Rahul Bhat, Richa Chadha, Aditi Rao Hydari, Saurabh Shukla, Vipin Sharma, Dalip Tahil, Deepraj Rana, Anil George, Sohaila Kapur, Vineet Kumar Singh, Anurag Kashyap Hindi

Text flashed on screen before the first scene rolls lets on that this film is inspired by both Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novella Devdas, arguably the most adapted home-grown literary work in Indian cinema, and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What common ground could there possibly be between the story of a weak-willed Bengali aristocrat drowning his unconsummated love in alcohol, and a Danish prince drowning in a desire for revenge against his scheming uncle and allegedly traitorous mother? What meeting point is there between a spineless fellow who wept at a fate he could have fashioned if he had had the courage to defy his convention-ridden, classist parents, and another so single-minded in his quest for vendetta that he let everything else in his life slip away as a result?

The answer is quite simple, actually: it lies in the self-destructiveness of both Hamlet and Devdas. In merging these two characters and turning each on its head in the end, Sudhir Mishra has conducted one of the most exciting writing experiments seen in a while for the Hindi film screen. The writer-director’s protagonist Dev Pratap Chauhan (played by Rahul Bhat) is melancholy like the legendary fictional men on whom he is based, but is not fatalistic like the foolish – and frankly, boring – Devdas, nor quite as mentally muddled as Hamlet.

Mishra’s Daas Dev might have been phenomenal then if its women characters – based on the Paro, Chandramukhi and Queen Gertrude prototypes – had been written as well as the leading man. Sadly, they are not.

Daas Dev is set in the political badlands of Uttar Pradesh where, in the opening scene in 1997, we see Dev’s father, the charismatic star politician Vishambhar Pratap Chauhan’s very public and untimely death before his little son’s eyes. Twenty years later, the boy is now a drug addict, an alcoholic and a laggard, in love with his childhood friend Paro (Richa Chadha), daughter of his late father’s right hand man Naval Singh (Anil George) who has been politically exiled by Dev’s uncle Awdesh Pratap Chauhan (Saurabh Shukla).

The Chauhan family wealth is managed by Shrikant Sahay (Dalip Tahil) and his Woman Friday cum fixer-about-town Chandni Mehra (Aditi Rao Hydari) who is in love with Dev. She watches over him through his tumultuous relationships, his desperate attempt to recover from his substance abuse and his journey from indifference to interest in politics, knowing that he does not reciprocate her feelings for him.

The first half hour of Daas Dev is intriguing. Chandni is the narrator, the one who has watched and seen more than anyone realises. Oddly enough though, she is completely marginalised halfway through the storyline, so that what remains of her in memory now is not her strength but Hydari’s flawless back to which Mishra has paid considerably greater attention than to the writing of her character.

Paro and Chandramukhi were far more appealing people than Devdas in the original text. The screenplay by Mishra and Jaydeep Sarkar does wonderful things to the main man but seems not to know what to do with these two strong women. Richa Chadha still manages to lend some spark to Paro, but Hydari seems unable to rise above her exquisite looks to invest herself in Chandni. More than ever, her limp performance made me long for Madhuri Dixit’s firecracker of a Chandramukhi in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2002 extravaganza Devdas.

As for Gertrude, in this case Dev’s mother Sushila Devi (Sohaila Kapur) – she exists on the sidelines for so long that even the wonderful Kapur’s speaking eyes cannot save her from being anything other than a sidelight, albeit one who eventually turns out to be pivotal to the plot.

The men are better served by the writing, and some of them return the favour with gusto. Rahul Bhat has the remarkable ability to look bruised, damaged and torn when he gets into a character. His Dev, who is a slave (daas) of his own weaknesses until he finds his life’s purpose, is a beautifully broken fellow, still mourning the loss of a beloved father he idolised and deriving his earnestness towards politics from the memory of that idealistic man. Bhat gives his character both vulnerability and strength, making you wonder why we see him so rarely on the big screen and why he is so vastly underrated.

DoP Sachin K. Krishn’s use of darkness and shadows in Daas Dev enhances the air of intrigue in the plot and is especially dramatic around Dev. There are shots in which his face is completely black, his reactions therefore inscrutable if it weren’t for the actor’s body language.

Vipin Sharma playing a wily politician is fantastic as always, as is Saurabh Shukla. Producer-director-writer Anurag Kashyap makes a short but impactful appearance as Vishambhar, giving us yet another reminder – after 2016’s Akira – that he is an under-explored actor. Vineet Kumar Singh, who was astonishingly good on his debut as a lead earlier this year in Kashyap’s Mukkabaaz, is impressive in a brief role as a man in love with Paro.

The uneven characterisation apart, the plot too unfolds in a series of twists and turns that, though not unconvincing, play out in a narrative style that feels by now too familiar in the mould of films made by Prakash Jha, Kashyap and Mishra himself.

Someone on the team of Daas Dev seems to have assumed that you can compensate for inconsistent writing with an unrelenting soundtrack. Although several of the songs in Daas Dev are quite lovely (in particular Sehmi hai dhadkan composed by Vipin Patwa, Rangdaari by Arko and Challa chaap chunariya by Sandesh Shandilya) there are just too many musical interludes in the film, and the songs and background score are played too much and too loud so that at one point when a character snapped, “Can you shut off that damned song?” for a moment I thought someone in the audience had called out those words because the music had gotten so overbearing by then.

It is surprising that writing would be the Achilles heel of a film by Mishra, the man who co-wrote the screenplay of Kundan Shah’s cult classic Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, but that is the way the cookie crumbles in Daas Dev. When Mishra released Yeh Saali Zindagi in 2011, I remember writing that that film felt over-crowded with characters and complications. Ditto for this one. A Devdas-cum-Hamlet story still feels like it is worth a shot, perhaps even another shot by Mishra, but this one fails to live up to its promise  despite an excellent central performance and an unusual interpretation of two iconic literary characters.

Rating (out of five stars): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	140 minutes

A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/daas-dev-movie-review-sudhir-mishra-stands-devdas-and-hamlet-nicely-on-their-heads-but-does-not-live-up-to-his-own-promise-4447635.html

Poster courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/DaasdevTheFilm/